How SMS Messages are Transmitted
Give or take a few characters, most global carriers support 160 characters of text inside one SMS message. We’re sure that you’ve probably noticed that many SMS text messages exceed this count. In business-2-consumer messaging, there is generally support for up to 1600 characters of text to be delivered as one SMS message.
The above may seem contradictory, but understanding how carriers deliver messaging will help provide some clarity. SMS stands for Short Message Service. By design, it’s meant to be very short. This guarantees very light payloads that can travel across networks at a high rate of speed to be delivered to the mobile handset, or vice versa. This reason alone is why SMS may never go away. It’s the perfect communications tool in an emergency.
However, sometimes keeping to 160 characters is tough to do in a business-2-consumer messaging. That is especially true in staffing. So how do the carriers do it? They break your message into 160 character segments.
Let’s say you craft a message that is 400 characters. Your message will be received to the carrier network and broken into 3 segments for delivery. Each one of these segments is billed as a 160 character (or less) SMS text message. In this example above, you’ll be billed for 3 SMS text messages.
Once your message reaches the destination handset, it will be concatenated and rebuilt. In almost all cases, it will look exactly as you typed it. Magic!
High Character Messages and Carrier Filtering
As mentioned above, SMS was designed to be short. Carrier filtering algorithms get concerned when they see SMS messages that belong in an email start flowing through their networks. Please carefully review content and trim where you can.
High Character Messages and Response Rates
Very long messages don’t traditionally perform well at Sense. No one likes to read extremely wordy text messages. In addition, please consider using just one call-2-action (CTA). Multiple CTAs in an SMS will sink response rates. Additional best practices for messaging can also be found here.
What Character Count does Sense Recommend?
Sense recommends keeping any volume SMS messaging below 320 characters. Sense Engage will warn you if you create a message greater than 480 characters. Sense Engage caps your total message characters to 1,080.